And suddenly, in the ambulance which transported him after a heart attack “deemed serious” by doctors, in April 2023, Jean-Marie Le Pen began… to sing. A way of defying death which he will have braved to the end. “She has been present throughout my life. So, I don’t fear it, it doesn’t scare me,” he confided to us a few days after this accident, while reading through the book of his life: the disappearance of his father aboard a trawler under a German mine, when he is 14 years old; the explosion of the Parisian apartment of the Villa Poirié (15th century) in November 1976, which almost took away his entire family under the 4 kg of dynamite placed in front of his door; and his numerous health scares which, in recent years, punctuated his daily life.
“I walk with a cane, I hear less and less well and I read with a magnifying glass. I live, I survive. I fill in the holes as I go. But I’m not in the wooden box yet! », he provoked again a few months ago. Before his condition suddenly deteriorated in recent weeks. Death finally came looking for him in his 96th year.
Jean-Marie Le Pen had a thousand lives: fisherman, underground miner, apartment surveyor, volunteer in the 1st parachute regiment (where he embarked for Indochina, the Suez Crisis and the Algerian War ), also the owner of a record publishing company, and then, of course, politics.
Elected youngest MP in 1956 at the age of 27, before serving his last mandate sixty-three years later, that of European parliamentarian, in July 2019… at 91 years old. Unrivaled longevity. In the middle of all this, the National Front, his life’s work, went from the status of a small far-right group in 1972 to that of a major player in French political life which would lead him to the second round of the election. presidential in 2002.
Vile outbursts to maintain the image of being unsociable
From him, the French will remember the image of a troublemaker who will have permanently installed the themes of immigration and insecurity in the electoral campaigns. “I am a scout,” Marine Le Pen’s father defined himself.
PODCAST (broadcast in 2019). Twilight by Jean-Marie Le Pen
Capable, too, of the most ignoble outbursts to maintain this image of being out of touch: the famous “detail” affair on the gas chambers in 1987, his friendship repeated several times for Marshal Pétain, the German occupation that he did not judged “not so inhumane” in 2005, the AIDS patients whom he had described years earlier as “AIDS”, “Durafour crematorium”, the “batch » by Patrick Bruel, or even “Mgr Ebola” in 2014 to resolve the demographic problem in Africa.
Comments which each time earned him legal convictions, notably for advocating war crimes and contesting crimes against humanity, but also for provoking racial hatred.
Jean-Marie Le Pen, however, has never expressed the slightest remorse: “The notion of slippage repels me. I am a free man. No redemption, no self-censorship. It’s too tiring,” he told us in the last years of his life, and added: “If I caused shock, it was never a problem for me, but for others. I don’t ask to be loved. » Provocation, to the end.
